11.0 Abstract: Pathology and Biorepository Shared Service The mission of the Pathology and Biorepository Shared Service (PBSS) is to maintain and provide investigators with access to an extensive catalog of patient tissue samples and to make available pathology/histology services and consultation. The PBSS provides access to a high-quality bank of stored patient samples (tissue and other preparations) while maintaining patient confidentiality. This permits individual UMGCC investigators to perform genomic, proteomic, and other studies aimed at understanding the biology of normal and diseased tissues with an ultimate goal of translating this knowledge into diagnostic and clinical applications. The PBSS also provides high-quality pathology, histology, and histotechnology consultation services to assist investigators in procurement, analyses, and clinicopathologic characterization of cancer specimens. This is the sole tissue bank shared service for specimens removed at surgery on the campus. The PBSS has developed a close and fruitful working relationship with the Anatomic Pathology Division of the Department of Pathology, which facilitates the ability of the PBSS to obtain well-characterized tissue samples and pathology and histology expertise. The PBSS frozen tissue archive consists of over 7,000 frozen tumor samples, 5,900 of which are paired with normal tissue from the same patient, and over 1,260,000 formalin- fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue blocks with various pathologic diagnoses obtained at the University of Maryland Medical Center from 1991 to present. The database for these samples contains patient demographic, epidemiologic, pathologic, and followup information. In 2014, the PBSS supported 48 Cancer Center members spanning all 5 research programs (19 percent of all UMGCC members), 54 percent of whom have peer-reviewed funding. The PBSS supports many cancer- related publications annually, many in high-impact journals including Clinical Cancer Research, Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Blood.